Thanks very much, Mr. Chair. Good morning to you and colleagues.
I hope everyone had a restful time with family and was able to catch up with and connect with their communities.
It was a challenging Christmas for many Canadians. We saw record food bank use and, of course, people facing challenges with their home heating bills. I just want to quickly go over a couple of headlines, and then I have a motion that I would like to put forward to the committee.
Some of the headlines we saw over this Christmas were “High prices, tight budgets have Canadians trimming how they'll celebrate this Christmas”, “Montreal soup kitchen may have to stop feeding homeless for first time since 1877”, “‘All I’m doing...is working and paying bills.’ Why some are leaving Canada for more affordable countries” and “The rising cost of living means this mom of 3 goes hungry so her kids can eat”. It has been a challenging time for many people, and it's heartbreaking to see the struggles that our fellow Canadians are going through.
Here are two more headlines: “Trudeau's office won't answer questions on $84,000 vacation” and “Trudeau given free stay at $9,300-a-night luxury Jamaican villa over Christmas holidays”. This is, of course, what brings us here, and those numbers are staggering. We have an $84,000 vacation when the median Canadian household income is about $70,000.
The problem begins with the first explanation the Prime Minister's Office gave about this vacation. This isn't a question about a prime minister being deserving of a vacation or anyone being deserving of a vacation. If they're able to afford it and they have the time and their health, it's wonderful that they're able to do that.
The problem is that the first answer the Prime Minister's Office gave to Canadians about this was the Prime Minister was paying for the vacation. It wasn't until the media followed up, learned about the cost of the destination and asked who was paying for it.... The answer was that, in fact, the Prime Minister was not paying for this vacation.
We started with the Prime Minister saying he was paying for it, and then saying it was being gifted to him.
That's a remarkable gift: $84,000. The question of whether or not a prime minister should be accepting gifts worth $84,000 is one that, perhaps, an eventual study at this committee could consider—whether it's ever appropriate.
The story changed again and the Prime Minister offered a third version of events, saying he was staying with friends at their place and he wasn't paying for it. We know that the Prime Minister's Office said the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner cleared the vacation.
The Ethics Commissioner has since said that's not a function they provide. They don't pre-clear vacations. The Ethics Commissioner cannot release the correspondence between the Prime Minister and his office without the authority, an instruction or a production order to do so. That can be resolved by the Prime Minister furnishing Parliament and Canadians with that correspondence and releasing it, demonstrating that the third story we got from the Prime Minister was, in fact, the same story he gave the Ethics Commissioner.
The question is this: Was the Ethics Commissioner deceived or misled in any way? We need to get to the bottom of that.
The best way to do that would be to have the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner come to this committee. We could look at a number of things, but the precision of what we need to accomplish.... The reason we're here is to deal with this specific event and this $84,000 gift. It happened to take the form of a vacation.
That's why I have the following motion to move. I have it in both official languages. The clerk should have received a copy of it.
Very simply, Chair, I move:
That the Interim Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner appear at the earliest opportunity regarding the Prime Minister’s vacation to Jamaica.